We have had a very productive week and everyone has made tremendous progress. When we started I think it would be fair to say participants had not had much experience with e-learning tools, and some were unsure how far they would be able to progress during the course or had only modest expectations about what could be achieved. The reality however was that everyone quickly got the hang of using a range of tools and approaches including creating formative assessments online, using WordPress to create an online course resource, and using Quandry to create a virtual patient case study. For a summary of what each student achieved, please see the individual student blogs – links on the right.

As part of exploring new technologies we had an introduction to CISCO Telepresence conferencing system this afternoon. The service worked well and was certainly of high quality. The remote participants appeared at near life-size and appeared on screen without any of the lag or jitter that often accompanies desktop video conferencing like Skype. Our remote participant was able to share a computer screen with us so that we were able to view a prepared presentation.

The only aspect we hadn’t anticipated is that currently there is no picture-in-picture so that we can see what the remote participants see, and that for more than 3 people the conferencing cameras switch so it’s not possible to see a whole table of participants at once. Other than that it was an interesting experience and we will definitely be thinking of other creative uses of the technology.

We started the day with an historical perspective of developing digital content, starting with CDROM-based multimedia content, early days of the web, the social web and the mobile web. A copy of the presentation is available for participants on the module web site.

Participants are now starting to think about what resources or activities they would like to build during the module. We have put together some questions to guide thinking: